The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [3]
“Thanks,” said Father Gustave, as they all got out. He was speaking to Father Aubrey, who’s offered him a supportive hand.
“We aim to please, sir,” the cab’s Artificial Intelligence replied, automatically. “We hope to have the pleasure of your patronage again.”
By the time they got half way along the cloister, Sara had stopped peering into the picture-windows on her right because her eyes had fixed themselves on the prospect ahead—not so much on the fire fountain itself, oddly enough, but on the crowd gathered around it.
The fact that there were twenty-five or thirty adults standing around the fire fountain was uninteresting, so Sara was hardly aware of it. The fact that they had brought their own children was a different matter.
Sara had met hundreds of other children in dozens of different virtual spaces, in addition to the fifteen classmates of her own age who were her regular companions in school. She often played with other children, in the many and various ways that children could play together while they were wearing hoods in their separate rooms. She was perfectly used to being with other children—but the only one she had ever met “in the flesh” was an older boy named Mike whom she had encountered on two occasions, quite by chance, when her parents had taken her for a walk in the countryside surrounding her hometree.
Because Mike and Sara had each been accompanied, on both occasions, by at least four adults, and because they were so obviously not the same age, their meetings had been guarded and wary, and certainly had not involved any actual physical contact. Although Mike attended Sara’s school he was two years ahead of her, and had not so far deigned to recognize her during assemblies, break times or club sessions. Sara didn’t even know his second name. Now, though, she found herself close—actually close—to no less than five other children of assorted ages. They ranged from a babe in arms to a boy twice as tall as Sara, who might have been nine or ten.
It was these other children, rather than the fountain, that drew Sara’s eyes. As she approached them, in company with her parental escort, all of them—even the big boy—turned their eyes towards her, with similar curiosity.
* * * *
When she recalled this experience at the age of fourteen, after the Dragon Man’s funeral, Sara wondered why she hadn’t noticed at the time that it wasn’t only the children who were looking at her avidly, consumed with curiosity. The simple answer was that her own attention had been too narrowly focused—but there was a little more to it than that.
Six-year-old Sara was accustomed to being the centre of her own parents’ attention, so it didn’t seem to her that being looked at by adults as anything out of the ordinary. She had been too young, at that time, to realize that there was anything to be noticed, or pondered upon, in the fact that other adults were looking at her too. Children were a different matter. The fact that she could meet their eyes in real space—“meatspace”, as Father Lemuel insisted on calling it—had seemed extraordinarily significant.
And so it had been, fourteen-year-old Sara thought. It had been as significant, in its own way, as the shop whose window of which her six-year-old self had not yet caught sight.
CHAPTER II
Sara knew that the other children who had been brought to see the fire fountain that day must all attend the same school she did. Blackburn was not the kind of town that attracted tourists from outside the county. She was surprised, therefore, that she could only put a name to one of them: a girl wearing a pale blue smartsuit not unlike her own. Her name was Samantha Curtyn, and she was eight.
The boy in dark green standing next to Samantha—close enough to touch her, although his hands were at his sides—also seemed to be about eight, but Sara couldn’t remember seeing him in school.
It wasn’t surprising that Sara couldn’t identify the other girl in the crowd,